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3 Responses

I don't think buying the domain in a specific country will change anything.

In France the most common hosting companies are OVH (www.ovh.com), Amen (www.amen.fr), and Gandi (www.gandi.net), and I know that OVH offers you to choose a country for your IP, so you can focus a specific local market with it.

And for your plan with the .com with sub-folders, I think it's a good choice !

first of all I would consider how strong it is my .ie site. If it is not that strong (i.e.: general rankings, link profile, social presence...), then I would migrate it to the .com domain name.

Then, during the migration, I would 301 all the existing URLs of .ie site to their correspondent in .com one,

When the .com is set with the country targeted sub carpets, I would specify in Google Webmaster Tools that the subcarpets /ie/, /uk/ and /fr/ are geotargeting Ireland, UK and France (the geolocalization of the .com/ must not be set, if you mean to use it for the global market.

Then, I would implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in order to specify that the /ie/ content is meant to be the one to show to user from Ireland, the /uk/ for user from UK and /fr/ to users from France.

Finally, in the case the English contents in .com, .com/ie/ and .com/uk/ are identical or substantially identical, I would also set for the /ie/ and /uk/ URLs the .com's URLs as being canonical ones.

More infos in these official Google posts here (and maybe more understandable than my answer):

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